Admission Letter - Not sure why I have all the drafts of things and not the final copies.
CDSP is the culmination of 5 years of doubts, questions and fears. The first time the idea even crossed my mind that I, too, could attend a seminary was during the 2003 General Convention. Sadly, it wasn’t even my idea. My husband informed me that I should stop yelling at NPR and just go to seminary already.
I put seminary out of my mind and instead got more involved in my parish. If there was a need for shelter coordinators, I stepped up. If there was an opening in the rotation for acolytes, I learned how. When an opportunity arose to learn to preach, I cried my way through my fears of public speaking and learned to do that too. As I learned that I was exceptionally talented at things that I certainly had never exhibited talent in before I began to wonder if seminary would actually get in the way of those talents. Having spent so many tears on relearning to see myself, why mess with a good thing?
Eventually, it became clear that I was exploring the call to ordination. I had to start rethinking seminary, since seminary was a huge part of the package. In fact, I am still working on that call. God willing, this education will be put to use building bridges between Christ and the people I minister to now.
That isn’t why I am ready to go to seminary now. That is why I need to go to seminary, eventually.
I have reached the limits of self-directed study. I have reached a place where I am ready to start breaking down and rebuilding what I know of my own faith, of the historic Christian faith, and the faith of others outside Christianity. It is the convergence of those three sets that makes CDSP my school of choice.
My own faith has been the concrete faith of childhood, the anger of disillusioned youth and the convoluted musing of philosophers. New aspects of faith that I hope to nurture and expand at CDSP include the notion of truth that is not fact, and the faith of the child that Paul speaks of, that of trust in the face of uncertainty.
My spiritual upbringing in the Baptist tradition has often left me on half built bridges of my own making. The belief that the individual conscience is an accurate indicator of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit belies the tradition of the Apostolic Church recorded in the New Testament. However, a little bit of church history, which I did not receive in that tradition, has made it clear how and why the tradition evolved. I want to know more about the various permutations that the Church has manifested. I want to encourage the current rise in unity between denominations that is currently manifesting in the American landscape. Only knowledge, which leads to understanding, can make that possible. That CDSP is part of that unity makes it particularly desirable.
Lastly, people have found many ways to span the gap between God and themselves. While I have my reasons for thinking that Christ will be the penultimate way in which God breaches that divide, other bridges have much to teach us about our own historic choices in permeating His Gospel in the world. Evangelism happens one changed life touching one other life at a time, and it can never take hold with honesty and integrity when it does not respect the ways in which each life has crossed the span between God and self. Monotheism is not monolithic. Each of us has a personal revelation of God and it is a varied as life itself.
